So the county's school threw another random prom, even though I personally put in an ordinance (NRaas StoryProgression) in place to prevent that (turning proms OFF in multiple different ways); so out of playful spite, the Mexicali lich girl throws a slumber party on the same night, inviting all her schoolmates, leaving the school empty on prom night.

Next day, we're all in Shang Simla, ready to plunder for treasure and eat egg rolls.

Bridget and Lola spent 9 days in Shang Simla and made a lot of progress. Bridget can now wear a brown belt...



And NOW she can kick! She moves so fast it's hard to catch a good shot of her.



She's a pocket sized whirlwind!

And of all my sims she's the first to do this...



Champions brave from days of yore
Who's deeds are sung from shore to shore,
Now gathered all in heroes halls,
Where noblest trophies grace the walls.
Who's might and main was thought the least
Now stands in honour at your feast.
Raise high the mead horn, be nothing lax,
To praise bold Bridget of the axe!

It's funny how the devs said that Sims 4 Sims are so much smarter. I did test how long a family could survive without input from me. Same family mash-up in Sims 2, 3 and 4. (I might have been inspired by a CallMeKevin video). After testing I concluded that Sims 3 sims survived all on their own, as all the kids grew up while in the other games it usually ended with just one living sim left.

Yeah... In Sims 2, sims will go "Oh, I'm hungry. I should go play on the computer. That will make me feel better." In Sims 3, they're a tad better about tending to their needs. When a need is low, they usually go tend to it.
Of course, occasionally you get an idiot, like a sim who eats dinner outside in his underwear in the dead of winter. Also, I once made a household full of roommates, and despite having beds assigned to everyone, one sim took days to use his bed. He kept napping on the sofa, where other sims turned on the TV or stereo and woke him, or he would pass out in random places, like the living room floor or the lawn. Sometimes it feels like there's secret personality values hidden deep within the game, because why is this one specific cat obsessed with guarding his food bowl. He doesn't even have the aggressive trait, and the other cats aren't doing this. And why is this one sim dumber than a box of rocks.
Granted, the other thing about Sims 3 is that it takes longer for sims to starve than in previous Sims games. They have a 24-hour 'starving' moodlet before they finally keel over.

I've been on a Sims 2 kick, so I don't have many stories of recent Sims 3 gameplay. About all I've done recently is open and close Sims 3 a thousand times tonight while testing a mod, so all I can say is that sims are very dedicated to a certain task, till death do they part.
On a related note, when making a mod, do you ever have moments where you think, "You know, these screenshots are very weird." I have a bunch of images of sims suffering, wetting themselves, and dying. I swear there was an actual point to all this.

This game certainly likes to mess with your mind.

One of my current sims lives in Isla Paradiso and she is a scuba diver. For many sim days she had an opportunity to find two sea urchins and deliver them to the restaurant. But could she find any sea urchins? Oh no! In fact, I think I've only seen one sea urchin the whole time she's been diving, and she's currently at Level 9! So in the end I got fed up and cancelled the opportunity in favour of new one: she must now find two eels. "Sounds better" methinks, "I've seen quite a lot of eels and caught not a few. Lets go for it". So what, do you suppose, was the first thing I beheld on my very next dive? TWO sea urchins, sitting right next to one another!

And were there any eels? Of course not! It's a blinking conspiracy, that's what it is!

I was able to get my game back up and running.

I created a simself and, once again I committed to the celebrity sim sin.

This time...Bill Nye was in my sights for my simulation.

With that in mind, my simself and Bill have yet to move in, but then again, I am having a rough day today.

Mainly because my schedule got upended by my mother's insistence to deep clean the kitchen.

I originally was supposed to do this on this November 27, which was Bill Nye's 70th birthday this year. However, my father insisted I was to keep watch on the Thanksgiving dinner. He burnt the sweet potatoes twice in different stages.

Either way, I have Sunset Valley in my sights.

Sigh. I tried to launch Sims 3... but it won't load. I get a black screen and nothing else. So I recreated the Sims 3 folder. But the game doesn't want to play nicely with my mods. I have found two troublesome mods so far, Simler90gameplay mod and CmarNYC XCAS. They have always worked before... I don't know why they're causing troubles now.

If your install is from the EA App, a minor patch was released a while ago and it's likely that you're getting the core mismatch bug - as those are both core mods that needed to be updated for it. If you aren't on EA App, it could be that you accidentally have the versions that are for it.

Here's the update for Cmar's: https://www.nraas.net/community/post105838#p105838
No clue if Simler offers multiple versions.

I was trying to make an imaginary friend real but even though the kid had a really high relayionship with his imaginary friend and also the potion, the imaginary friend was suddenly in permanent toy state. I have many saves, so I'll just roll back a bunch. I think there might have been a stuck aging error on the imaginary friend, now I think of it.

I managed to get Simler's mod to work by editing the version number myself. Thanks for the link to the updated Cmar's XCAS. I already got an version for XCAS that was updated and added to by another creator. I don't know if their version has all the functions though, so it's good to have an alternative.

It's weird though... when I first encountered the bug the game screen was just stuck. But after repairing the files and trying, then I got the warning about version mismatch. Maybe repairing did something good.

That was probably the worst routing oddity I've ever seen. I have the Festival Park in that park that is between the Landgraabs and the Altos. Susan Pond and her grandfather stopped there because they were too stressed to continue with teaching/learning how to drive. Grandpa asks her to play some catch to calm down. They get on their bikes and ride all the way to the Goth house to play catch.

I have a single-sim household with two cats. My sim has written about 40 books, has a bunch of plants growing in her living room and bedroom (I moved them inside with the Into The Future rugs during the cold weather), and I'm going to have her work on painting.
Today, I also tested a custom slider I found. It's a size slider with a broad range, and the results were amusing. I made one of my cats as big as a horse, and as small as a mouse (albeit misshapen). And apparently if you pull the slider all the way to the left, the cat becomes a negative size and turns upside-down and inside-out. I took so many ridiculous screenshots. My sim holding a large cat, a giant cat on the furniture, tiny cats floating in mid-air, mutant cats with empty eye sockets...

That sounds hilarious! Do you have a link for the slider, or creator name please?

The cat size slider: https://web.archive.org/web/2013030...ist/608422.page

Thank you @Meowmocha !

Nraas MC slider settings also works for pet sliders. een a while, but I had my Sim as 1960's Catwoman, and played with a bunch of pet sliders, with Nraas slider range cranked up, and made a black panther. Of course, interaction were poorly aligned.

I have a sculptor Sim. But twice now that he has been sculpting he ended up with... something that was just a red flashing cube. According to NRaas it was some sort of failure object? I've no idea how to fix it tho. I checked with Deply's Sims 3 Dashboard but nothing showed up as corrupt. I did disable some objects that was conflicting with one another tho.

My level 10 firefighter Blaise Kindle in Twinbrook managed to get a D on a large housefire at the large mansion at the edge of town.

How, you ask? She decided to take her time to get to two of the smaller fires slipping and stumbling over the little pond first and then back to the larger fires that were blazing out of the windows. Took forever to extinguish, peed herself, wanted to try out the trampoline for bit, almost froze to death in -10C weather, until she got to the two sims trapped on the second floor. I think it's time for her to retire. She'll be an elder in 2 days.

What did you do? Put her on auto pilot??? I've had Sims do some pretty stupid stuff when I leave them to their own devices!

Sometimes sims do well left to their own devices. Other times, they're dumber than a box of rocks, and act like they don't know how to do simple things like eating, sleeping, and using the toilet. And why are you home when you should have been at work an hour ago??? Ugh...

Anyway, I had my teenaged sim move into her own house, taking the family cat, an expert hunter and a creature with an attitude problem, with her. I think I'll have the cat gradually mellow out with time. The cat sometimes goes to the neighbors' house for social interaction, since my teen sim is busy with school, music club, and her part-time job. Later, I'll have my sim get pregnant and become a single parent.